Background

North Yorkshire County Council was chosen by the Government to pilot an ambitious and innovative fostering programme for challenging young people.

 

The Treatment Foster Care Initiative is a radically different approach to the care of young people and involves carefully selecting specialist foster carers who can offer an intensive individually tailored programme. The biggest challenge facing NYCC was finding sufficient dedicated carers of the right calibre to make the scheme work.

 

Brief

DTW was asked to conceive, launch and implement an integrated PR campaign to reach a very special breed of potential foster carers. This included designing and distributing leaflets, posters and advertisements, organising press coverage and supplying other support materials to attract and recruit specialist foster carers.

 

Approach

Working with the Treatment Foster Care team, DTW produced a campaign creative theme and brand centred on the image of a young boy in a hooded top ‘a hoodie’. We added the strapline ‘Fostering Change’ to convey the message the young people who need care are likely to be challenging but being a treatment foster carer would be rewarding.

 

We undertook a structured PR campaign, negotiating media partnerships with the editors of local newspapers, supplying news releases and feature articles with case studies. This was supported by paid-for advertising, a leaflet and poster campaign and a named direct mail-out. We also produced a detailed

information booklet in response to requests for more details plus support materials which included a slide template for a PowerPoint presentation, a portable banner stand for use at events and web-based adverts on the specialist local government recruitment website.

 

Outcomes

The Fostering Change campaign to recruit treatment foster carers was extremely successful with 160 inquiries in total. Seven sets of treatment foster carers have been recruited. The other queries did not fit the specialist criteria for treatment foster carers but a high number have been converted into regular foster carers.

 

Dawn Walker, Team Leader – Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care Team (North) said: “North Yorkshire has been a shining light in recruitment. Other authorities are having real difficulties with recruitment but North Yorkshire has performed exceedingly well.”

 

The campaign was also used to successfully attract and recruit a number of top social services professionals to work on the Treatment Foster Care Programme.